A few days after John Franklin bought it, when it started to feel like we could begin to talk about it, or at least acknowledge that it had happened, I asked Zip how many dead people he’d seen before. He said a thousand. Turned out he’d been working at his dad’s funeral home for years.

“You don’t want to know what we had to do to those bodies,” said Zip.

“Not particularly.”

He told me anyway.

“First you suck all the blood out and replace it with embalming fluid. Fasten the eyes and mouth shut. All the leak-prone orifices have to be plugged. If a person’s been decapitated or something you have to piece them back together.”

“I see.”

“A lot of the time when we pump the embalming fluid in, the deceased gets an erection. If it’s a dude. We have to, like, tape it to his leg.”

I imagined a mourning family crowded around an open casket, everyone studiously ignoring the tent in the pants of the silver-haired occupant.

“The worst I saw was a guy who got run over by a forklift.”

“Jesus.”

“Tore his legs off. Dragged his top half face-down across ten yards of gravel.”

“How’s that even happen?” I asked. I tried and failed to avoid imagining it happening to me.

“Dunno. Runaway forklift.”

“Forklift can’t possibly go more than ten, fifteen miles an hour.”

“My dad was an artist. Sewed the two halves together, repaired the skin, and rebuilt the skull with putty. Looking at the guy in the casket, you would have thought he died of a heart attack.”

We were jogging around the field, cooling down after a long workout. Tomorrow was another sim day, and the day after that was the half-marathon. If I flopped in either of those I’d be expelled. This knowledge, combined with John Franklin’s death, had given the past few days an element of surrealism, as if I could dismiss the whole mirage with a wave of my hand.

We rounded the field and slowed to a walk, headed for the barracks. In the distance, the grapple course loomed against the darkening sky. It looked like the stained brown skeleton of some enormous creature. One of the truly monstrous things, the ones that lived out in the middle of the Pacific Forest, with heat signatures visible to satellites.

Up next was a quick shower. Hopefully there was some hot water left. Either way, a quick shower, and then a trip to the mess hall for dinner. It was mystery meat night, which prospect had horrified me earlier. Now I was starving. I would probably have eaten wood chips, provided I had ketchup to slather them in.

“People say the forest’s so dangerous,” said Zip, “but out here you can get torn to shreds by a forklift. You can slip off the grapple course and fall to your death. You can trip getting off the bus and break your neck on the sidewalk. How’s that any less dangerous?”

“Wow, you might be on to something, there, Zip,” I said. “Wait, remind me — which is the place with snakes the size of subway trains, again?”

“Dead is dead,” said Zip. “When you’re dead, it doesn’t matter whether it was a drunk driver or a subway snake that killed you.”

We came to the door of the barracks. Inside, the fluorescent lights hummed, bathing everything in anemic gray light. The whole building had the sickly lemon-tinted odor of institutional cleaning products.

“What you really have to watch out for,” I said, “is an inebriated subway snake.”

By the time we made it to the mess hall, the line for food was twenty recruits long. When I asked the lady for “just a little” creamed corn, she scowled and slapped a heaping dollop onto my tray. It oozed and seeped out of its designated inlet, mixing with my flaccid green beans.

“Thanks, ma’am,” I said.

“Move along,” she said.

We sat across from Li, whose table was typically on the empty side.

“Howdy, Li,” said Zip.

Li pushed green beans around in figure eights on her tray.

“Hi,” she said.

“Looks like you’re enjoying yourself,” I said.

She gave me a look.

“I’m starving,” said Zip. Then he was shoveling food into his mouth. I knew from experience that it would be a few minutes before he said anything else.

Li watched him eat with half-lidded eyes.

“Like a vacuum cleaner, isn’t it,” I said.

She turned her head very deliberately in my direction. I busied myself with my fork and knife, cutting my mystery meat into strips.

“Where are you from, Tetris?” she asked.

I’d already taken a bite. I swallowed it hastily, covering my mouth, and chased it down with water.“Indiana,” I said. “Why?”

“I was trying to figure it out based on your accent,” she said.

I grinned.

“People from Indiana don’t have an accent,” I said.

She inclined her head.

“You sure?”

“Nawt lahk folks from New Ahlens,” said Zip.

I looked at him, appalled.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Southern accent. Pretty good, right?”

“Reprehensible,” said Li.

Zip squinted at her, then leaned my way.

“What’s reprensable?” he asked, mock-whispering.

I noticed Sergeant Rivers crossing the mess hall. Seven feet tall, he moved with the slow precision of someone who’d spent a lifetime accidentally smashing objects in his vicinity.

Rivers had lost an eye on an expedition, but he didn't wear a patch, didn't have a fake eye, nothing like that. He had a mess of interlocking scar tissue in his right eye socket. When someone made him frown, which happened a lot, the cratered scar tissue crumpled horribly.

“Hey, Sergeant,” called Li when he passed our table.

Rivers paused.

“Recruit.”

“You said you were going to tell us the story about your eye,” said Li.

Rivers tugged out a chair and sat at the head of our table.

“When did I say that?”

“Three weeks back.”

He examined her balefully.

“Mm.”

“You said the story had an important moral,” said Zip.

“Did I?”

Recruits at the adjacent tables turned, their conversations subsiding.

“We’re sure itching to learn, Sergeant,” said Zip.

“Shut up,” hissed Li.

Junior slipped into the empty seat beside me, setting his tray down quietly.

Rivers looked around. He had the mess hall’s full attention.

“Alright,” he said, and cracked his enormous knuckles.

“Twenty years ago,” Rivers began, “there were no body cameras, no grapple guns, no GPS flares. You went out into the forest with rope, a compass, and your wits.”

I glanced at Zip. A gristly bit of mystery meat dangled off his half-raised fork.

“I lost the eye in 1998, on an expedition with Marcus O’Henry and Bo Carson. Great rangers, both of them.

“At first the forest was quiet. We only had to scale the trees twice, first to get away from an alligator, and the second time because the floor caved in.”

What’s hardest to grasp about the forest isn’t the size of its trees, or the ferocity of its inhabitants, or the fact that it covers so much of the Earth’s surface. The hardest part to wrap your mind around is the depth. The forest has been crawling up and over itself for millions of years, building on the skyscraper carcasses of the trees that came before. What seems like the floor in there is actually a thin green skin concealing caverns and tunnels that stretch down for miles.

Down beneath — that’s where the really nasty things live.

“The sixth day,” said Rivers, “I failed to spot a creeper vine draped across our path. For a point man, that’s a fatal mistake.”

The creeper vine is an appendage of a plant that lives in cavernous open spaces below the forest floor. Slowly, over a period of months, the tendrils grow out and upward, eventually coming to rest in the dim light on the surface.

“I happened to step right over it. O’Henry didn’t. The vine wrapped his leg from ankle to thigh. Before we could react, it yanked him through a gap in the floor.

“We should have abandoned him. As far as we knew, rescue attempts from caverns beneath the surface had a zero percent success rate. And company policy mandated calling off any expedition in which a ranger wound up underground.”

Recruits crowded around our table. The air in the mess hall had the breathless silence of a cathedral. Zip placed his fork down on his plate with a barely audible click.

“But we thought we knew better,” said Rivers.

He shifted, staring over the tops of our heads at the far wall.

“The thing was, it was my fault for not spotting the vine. So I decided to go after him. Bo, whose bravery bordered on stupidity, came with me. We fixed our lines to a rock, flicked on our headlamps, and jumped through the hole O’Henry had made in the floor. Down beneath, the only light came from our headlamps.

“I found the vine’s source — a huge, vomit-colored bulb — on a fallen tree trunk far below us. On either side of the branch, the chasm extended down forever, criss-crossed by roots and decaying tree trunks.

“As we lowered ourselves to the trunk, my fear amplified every sound a thousand times. My own breath wheezed like a leaf blower. Beneath my boots, the bark writhed with roaches, worms, and spiders stirred awake by my headlamp. Some of them scurried up my legs, and I did my best to brush them off.

“We moved quickly. It would only be a few moments before we were discovered. We circled the bulb, searching for a sign of O’Henry. I found his arm poking out from the seam between two leaves. Bo held the gap open, and I reached in, taking hold of O’Henry’s shoulder.

“As I pulled him out, an odor of sour decay flooded through the gap. Acid burns coated his unconscious body. The plant had already begun to digest him.”

“An assault rifle hung at my waist, but if I fired, the muzzle flash and noise would draw the attention of other predators. Bo and I would have a better chance if we dropped O’Henry and ran for the lines.

“And yet, once again, I couldn’t bring myself to leave O’Henry behind. I opened fire, aiming for the fleshy area around the centipede’s eye nubs. It screamed like a gutted pig and skittered away.

“Bo hefted O’Henry over a shoulder and made for the ropes. As I followed, the air filled with rumbles and shrieks. The forest was awake.

“With O’Henry hooked to his line, Bo triggered the autoclimber and zipped upward. I latched myself to my own line and flew up after them. Not a moment too soon, as something truly huge wrapped the tree trunk we’d been standing on in a tentacle and tugged it down into the abyss. I watched the plant bulb slide away, its many predatory vines snip-snapping in from all directions like a hundred vacuum cleaner cords recalled at once.

“Since I weighed much less than the combination of Bo and O’Henry, I passed them halfway to the surface. Just as I passed, a massive creature lunged from its hiding place somewhere to the side and engulfed Bo and O’Henry in a mouth glistening with teeth.

“I caught a glimpse of blue-green scales and a cluster of round black eyes, and then the thing was gone. I stared after it. Then the end of Bo’s rope, chasing the monster like a length of broken fishing line, came whipping down and lashed across my face, pulverizing my right eye.

“On the surface, I staggered and clutched a hand to my face in a feeble attempt to staunch the flow of blood. Using my climbing picks, I scaled the nearest tree. The blood running into my good eye rendered me functionally blind. I climbed and climbed, until finally I stopped, panting, and lowered myself onto a branch.

“Far below, I could see the forest floor roiling, as creatures summoned by the commotion tore into each other.

“Soon it was night, and I could no longer make out the chaos below, but that didn't stop the din from reaching me. The shrieks and crashes continued, until at last I fell asleep.”